User Contributed Notes 4 notes

in the example above, I would not use the while(1) and sleep() functions, since then you're back at waiting and polling for file changes, which you were trying to avoid using fam.

Instead, you can use while(fam_next_event($resource)), which blocks until there is an event. No polling, no useless wasting of cpu cycles.

Anyway, I have some problems with fam: It is very limited and almost useless.

- You cannot monitor a directory tree easily, since fam_monitor_directory() is non-recursive. Its an ugly hack, but you can go through each subdir and also monitor it with fam_monitor_directory().

- When you do that, you will have another problem: The events you get contain the code and the filename, but not the pathname of the file that caused the event. Thus, if you monitor two or more directories, and they possibly contain files with the same basename, you cannot find out what file has changed. One ugly solution might be to create a new fam_resource for each directory you want to monitor, but then you cannot use fam_next_event() in your while loop anymore.

- When a big file is saved (i.e. with photoshop via samba), you get file_changed events pretty much every second the file is being written to. It is not possible to receive ONE event AFTER the file operation is done.

I'm not sure, but I think most of this is not PHPs fault. Its just that fam (or dnotify, which fam uses on linux) sucks very badly. If you search on google, it seems everyone hates fam/dnotify (even linus), but noone has done anything about it yet.

If you find out how to work around thing, or if I'm completely wrong about all of this, please post here! Thanks!

/* opens a connection to the FAM service daemon */$fam_res = fam_open ();

/* * The second argument is the full pathname * of the file to monitor. * Note that you can't use relative pathnames.*/$nres = fam_monitor_file ( $fam_res, '/home/sergio/test/fam/file_to_monitor.log');